Whose War? ------
A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
March 12, 2003
The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. ... Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”
Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London ... one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of ... Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”
Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel’s bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties.’” Kaplan thunders:
The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.
What is going on here? Slate’s Mickey Kaus nails it in the headline of his retort: “Lawrence Kaplan Plays the Anti-Semitic Card.”
What Kaplan, Brooks, Boot, and Kagan are doing is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson does when caught with some mammoth contribution from a Fortune 500 company he has lately accused of discriminating. He plays the race card. So, too, the neoconservatives are trying to fend off critics by assassinating their character and impugning their motives.
Indeed, it is the charge of “anti-Semitism” itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.
And this time the boys have cried “wolf” once too often. It is not working. As Kaus notes, Kaplan’s own New Republic carries Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman. In writing of the four power centers in this capital that are clamoring for war, Hoffman himself describes the fourth thus:
And, finally, there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States. … These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
“If Stanley Hoffman can say this,” asks Kaus, “why can’t Chris Matthews?” Kaus also notes that Kaplan somehow failed to mention the most devastating piece tying the neoconservatives to Sharon and his Likud Party.
In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council. (Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites.)
Noting that Sharon repeatedly claims a “special closeness” to the Bushites, Kaiser writes, “For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.” And a valid question is: how did this come to be, and while it is surely in Sharon’s interest, is it in America’s interest?
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, “Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.
They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America. …
amconmag.com
==========
First and last war of the Bush Doctrine?
Posted: March 12, 2003
Patrick J Buchanan
As that latter-day Wilsonian Bill Clinton launched his war on a Serbia that did not attack us, George W. Bush intends to launch a war on an Iraq that has never threatened or attacked the United States.
Clinton bombed Serbia for 78 days for refusing his ultimatum to surrender Kosovo, cradle of that nation. But Bush is invading Iraq to validate a new doctrine he declared to the world a year ago, as his predecessor James Monroe declared the doctrine that bears his name.
Under the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, all European colonization of the Western Hemisphere was to end. But the Bush Doctrine is not confined to a hemisphere. It is universal. Its heart may be found in a single sentence in the 2002 State of the Union: "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
Inherent in the Bush Doctrine is "pre-emption." America claims an inherent right to initiate preventive wars on nations that do not threaten us or attack us, but may threaten or attack us someday in the future.
In June at West Point, Bush declared U.S. Cold War policy to be dead. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. ... If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.
"We must take this battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge." Thus, in 10 days, America launches her first pre-emptive war.
We are at the Rubicon, and Caesarism has led us here. But an even higher cause beckons us. In George W. Bush's mind, we are now at Armageddon, fighting for the Lord. "We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name," the president thundered to the cadets at West Point.
As the Iraqis are defenseless against us, they will be crushed – and the Bush Doctrine validated in the eyes of its evangelists.
Yet, if one looks to northeast Asia, another scene is being played out. The Bush Doctrine is being daily exposed as bluster and bluff. Since last fall, when Kim Jong Il brazenly conceded he was operating a secret program to enrich uranium for atom bombs, U.S. policy has seemed stumbling and incoherent.
North Korea has been acting, the United States reacting. After we cut off fuel, Pyongyang kicked U.N. inspectors out, re-fired its plutonium reactor, restarted a processing plant to extract fuel for atom bombs, sent fighters into the DMZ and fired a missile into the Sea of Japan the day South Korea's new president was sworn in.
Pyongyang then sent MiGs 150 miles offshore to force down a U.S. RC-135 in North Korea. Like the USS Pueblo in 1968, the plane was to be stripped of its secret instruments and codes, and the U.S. crew taken hostage and paraded to humiliate America. Now, North Korea has fired a second missile into the Sea of Japan.
What has been the administration's response to Kim's defiance of a doctrine that was to be the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy? Thus far, it has been conciliation and appeasement. We have politely told the North we are ready for talks, for a renewal of aid, for diplomatic recognition, for a public declaration that we will not attack. Secretary Rumsfeld last week held out the prospect of a total withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula.
No one is declaiming about "good and evil." No one is clamoring for a pre-emptive strike on the Yongbyon reactor – or to decapitate Kim's regime. Instead, reports are circulating here that the United States has recognized the reality that North Korea will soon join America, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan as ninth member of the Nuclear Club. If we do, the Bush Doctrine will be dead in Asia, even as Marines are fighting to validate it in Iraq.
Let it be said: America has an inherent right to strike first to prevent imminent attack. Had we sighted that Japanese task force north of Hawaii, before Pearl Harbor, we would have been within our rights to attack it. But to declare a new U.S. strategic doctrine that mandates pre-emptive wars on any rival powers that seek to acquire weapons we already have was an act of hubris.
One day soon, some nation – Iran, North Korea – will defy the Bush Doctrine and test an atomic weapon. When that day comes, the United States will have to go to war or jettison this "doctrine" and restore the foreign policy most consistent with our history, ideals and national interest: peace through strength, and non-intervention in the affairs of nations that do not threaten or attack us.
wnd.com |
